MAY    8   19: 

RELIGION    AND    TH   '   ' 
UNDERGRADUATE 


Four  Addresses  delivered  at 

PRINCETON   UNIVERSITY 

March,  1915 


BY 

ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

PRESIDENT  OF  THE  FACULTY  OF  ANDOVER  THEOLOGICAL  SEMINARY 


With  an  Introduction  by 
i  PRESIDENT  JOHN  GRIER  HIBBEN 


Published  under  the  auspices  of 
The  Daily  Princetonian  " 

Pncf,  30  Cents 


MAY    8    1! 


RELIGION    AND    TH 
UNDERGRADUATE 


Four  Addresses  delivered  at 

PRINCETON   UNIVERSITY 

March,  1915 


BY 

ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

PRESIDENT  OF  THE  FACULTY  OF  ANDOVER  THEOLOGICAL  SEMINARY 


With  an  Introduction  by 
PRESIDENT  JOHN  GRIER  HIBBEN 


Published  under  the  auspices  of 
"  The  Daily  Princetonian  " 

Pricf,  SO  Cents 


The  interest  aroused  by  the  series  of  addresses  delivered 
by  Dr.  Albert  P.  Fitch  before  the  students  of  Princeton  Univer- 
sity on  March  14,  15,  16  and  17  made  it  evident  that  these  should 
be  put  into  some  permanent  form.  They  are  now  published 
under  the  auspices  of  The  Daily  Princetonian  after  thorough 
revision  by  Dr.  Fitch,  and  with  his  kind  permission. 

The  following  facts  concerning  the  religious  meetings  at  which 
Dr.  Fitch  spoke  may  be  of  general  enough  interest  to  warrant 
their  being  set  down  here.  The  attendance  the  first  night  was 
about  900,  on  the  second  and  third  nights  about  1000  each,  and  on 
the  last  night  1100.  There  presided  on  successive  evenings  Presi- 
dent Hibben,  Rev.  Ralph  B.  Pomeroy,  rector  of  Trinity  Church, 
Princeton,  Professor  R.  M.  McElroy,  and  Professor  L.  H.  Miller. 
The  management  of  the  meetings  was  in  the  hands  of  the  Rev. 
J.  Nevin  Sayre  'OT  and  J.  M.  Colt  '14,  officers  of  the  Philadelphian 
Society.  To  these  men,  together  with  the  large  number  of 
undergraduates  who  gave  generously  of  their  time  and  energies 
in  preparing  the  University  for  Dr.  Fitch's  visit,  belongs  the  credit 
for  the  most  successful  event  of  the  sort  in  Princeton's  history. 

H.  F.  Armstrong 
J.  S.  Nicholas 


Additional  copies  may  be  obtained  at  The  University  Store, 
30  cents;  or  will  be  sent  postpaid  for  35  cents  upon  application 
to  D.  M.  Roy,  care  Princeton  University  Press,  Princeton,  N.  J. 


INTRODUCTION 

Dr.  Fitch's  addresses  have  left  a  profound  impression  upon  the 
heart  and  mind  Princeton.  The  unprecedently  large  attendance  of 
our  undergraduates  at  Dr.  Fitch's  meetings,  for  four  consecutive 
evenings,  their  eager  interest  and  sustained  attention  during  his 
closely  reasoned  presentation  of  the  fundamentals  of  Christian  truth, 
their  ready  response  to  his  appeal  as  to  the  claims  of  Christ  upon 
the  American  young  manhood  of  to-day  are  facts  of  deep  significance 
as  regards  the  spirit  of  religion  in  the  University.  In  a  place 
devoted  to  the  pursuit  of  learning,  where  our  students  are  brought 
face  to  face  with  the  great  world  problems  of  the  past  and  of 
the  present,  and  are  ever  encouraged  to  think  their  way  into  and 
through  these  problems,  it  would  be  strange  indeed  were  their 
thoughts  never  particularly  directed  to  the  serious  consideration 
of  the  place  of  religion  in  their  lives. 

Dr.  Fitch's  knowledge  of  the  temper  and  disposition  of  young  men, 
of  what  they  think  and  how  they  feel,  as  well  as  his  evident  love 
for  them  and  his  yearning  for  their  highest  interests,  his  loyalty 
to  "the  simplicity  that  is  in  Christ,"  his  exceptional  powers  of  acute 
analysis,  and  his  spirit  of  reverence  and  devotion,  have  served  to 
put  old  truths  in  a  new  light  and  force  them  upon  the  attention  and 
conviction  of  the  many  minds  open  to  such  a  challenge. 

John  Gkier  Hibben. 


FOREWORD 

The  following  addresses  were  delivered  without  notes  and  are 
here  reproduced,  with  corrections  and  emendations,  from  the  steno- 
graphic reports.  They  are  very  faulty  and  imperfect  witnesses  to 
the  joy  and  freedom,  the  beauty  and  power,  of  the  spiritual  life. 
There  would  be  no  slightest  justification  in  giving  them  the  dreadful 
perpetuity  of  print  except  that  they  may  serve  as  a  reminder,  to 
those  who  heard  them,  of  the  evident  grace  and  power  of  God 
which  dwelt  among  us  those  four  days  when,  as  a  great  body  of 
alert  and  eager  youth,  we  thought  together,  simply  and  sincerely, 
on  the  most  solemn  and  most  pressing  questions  of  the  human  soul. 
And  I  could  wish  that  every  undergraduate  who  reads  the  ensuing 
pages  might  feel  that  their  teaching  comes  to  him  again,  as  a  direct 
personal  message,  full  of  love  and  faith  and  cheer,  from  a  grateful 
and  joyous  servant  of  the  Lord  Jesus,  who  is  once  more  talking 
with  his  brothers  and  comrades  in  Princeton  University. 

A.  P.  F. 
25  March,  1915 


I 

WHAT    IS    RIUJGION    AND    WHAT    HAS    IT    TO   OFFER 
THE  EDUCATED  MAN? 

I  cannot  begin  the  first  of  these  addresses  without  expressing  tlie 
keen  sense  of  pleasure  and  the  overwhelming  consciousness  of  re- 
sponsibility with  which  I  undertake  the  task.  There  is  no  one  in 
the  world  quite  like  the  American  undergraduate  ;  you  are  the  most 
lovable  and  the  most  exasperating  creatures  God  ever  made,  an 
extraordinary  combination  of  perversity  and  promise,  genius  and 
childishness.  But  in  your  hands  lies  the  future  of  this  Republic ; 
by  virtue  of  your  youth  and  your  place  here  and  the  education  which 
this  place  offers,  you  are  to  be,  whether  we  will  or  no,  the  leaders 
of  the  coming  generation.  With  what  eager  and  wistful  joy  then, 
do  we  older  men  who  have  lost  youth — the  greatest  gift  of  the  gods 
— but  who  love  and  revere  it  in  you  who  face  the  morning;  with 
what  sense  of  solemn  accountability  mingling  with  our  joy,  do  we, 
out  of  our  knowledge  and  experience  speak  to  your  inexperience, 
your  faith,  your  ready  idealism. 

And  that  sense  of  responsibility  is  the  greater  because  of  the 
theme  of  these  discussions.  Religion  is  the  most  serious,  the  most 
permanent  and  inclusive  interest  of  human  beings.  The  sex  hunger, 
the  desire  for  food  and  clothing,  the  passion  to  understand  ourselves 
and  the  universe  in  which  we  live — these  are  the  great  motor  im- 
pulses of  our  race,  and  the  third  is  the  most  inclusive  of  them  all. 
No  man  understands  any  thing  about  religion  unless  he  realizes  that 
it  is  a  central  and  abiding  factor  in  human  progress  and  human 
destiny.  There  is  something  very  moving  in  realizing  that  we  share 
the  interest  which  has  brought  us  together  tonight,  with  all  our 
brothers.  Brown  and  yellow  and  black  and  white,  a  great  company 
which  no  man  can  number,  they  stand  upon  common  ground  with 
us  here.  Our  race  is  one  in  its  common  and  associated  sin.  its  com- 
mon desire  for  truth  and  righteousness,  its  common  need  of  grace  and 
pardon,  God's  common  occupation  of  us  all.  And  this  makes  it 
clear  enough  that,  in  his  need  of  religion  and  his  sense  of  its  supreme 
reality  and  importance,  the  educated  man  in  no  way  differs  from 


6  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

his  less  fortunate  brothers.  How  contemptible  would  be  the  spirit- 
ual pride  and  self-complacency  of  any  of  us  who  imagined  there  was 
one  sort  of  religion  for  the  scholar  and  another  for  the  man  in  the 
street !  No !  Nevertheless  in  the  expression  and  use  of  our  religion 
certain  obligations  rest  upon  us,  by  virtue  of  the  opportunities  given 
us  in  this  place,  which  do  not  rest  upon  less  educated  men.  We 
ought  to  take  our  religion  with  intelligence  as  well  as  feeling,  with 
discriminating  and  clear-seeing  passion.  We  are  under  solemn  obli- 
gations to  state  it  with  moral  candor  and  intellectual  integrity,  in  the 
language  of  our  own  time  from  the  point  of  view  of  our  own 
day ;  and  to  apply  it,  with  sincerity  and  courage  to  the  fears  and 
hopes,  the  sins  and  follies  of  our  own  generation.  It  may  justly 
be  expected  that  we  will  make  the  expression  of  religion  as  free  and 
simple  and  sincere  as  the  importance  and  reality  of  it  are  fundamental 
and  unchanging. 

We  come  then  to  our  first  question:  what  is  religion?  and  if  we 
take  it  in  the  broad  and  universal  sense  we  find  no  difficulty  in  its 
answer.  Religion  is  that  great  mass  of  speculations  and  faiths  which 
has  grown  out  of  a  twofold  human  experience.  Perhaps  you  will  re- 
member that  this  definition  implies  that  experience,  furnishes  both 
the  material  and  the  authority  of  the  religious  life.  Now  it  is  impor- 
tant to  understand  that.  Religion  is  not  the  creation  of  a  book  or 
priests,  or  governments,  or  institutions.  It  is  not  imposed  upon  us 
from  without  by  churches  or  creeds  or  ministers  or  parents.  It  is  an 
essential,  not  an  accidental,  thing  and  it  comes  from  within.  It 
springs  out  of  the  heart  of  our  race ;  from  the  deep  centers  of  human 
fears,  human  joy,  human  terror  and  helplessness,  human  aspira- 
tion and  insight,  it  issues.  Therefore  the  reality  and  authority  of 
religion  are  as  veritable  and  undeniable  as  the  experience  which  pro- 
duces it  is  universal  and  intelligible.  Let  us  get  clear,  at  the  outset, 
that  religion  is  not  the  product  of  its  many  organized  and  conven- 
tional manifestations.    It  made  them ;  it  was  not  made  by  them. 

But  what  is  this  twofold  experience  of  our  race  out  of  which 
religion  issues?  In  a  word  it  is  the  sense  of  the  supermundane  nature 
of  reality, — the  perception  that  the  significance  and  power  of  the 
universe  lie  behind,  are  hidden  within,  its  visible  and  temporal  ex- 
pressions— coujiled  with  the  sense  that  man  has  somehow  separated 
himself  from  this  invisible  and  potent  reality  and  that  it  is  of  the 
first  importance  to  us  to  get  in  touch  with  it,  be  reconciled  to  it, 
again.    This  is  what  William  James  refers  to  when  he  speaks  of  ''the 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  7 

profoiiiid  uneasiness  of  the  race,  tlic  sense  of  there  being  something 
wrong  about  us  as  we  naturally  stand."  What  is  life?  \Vc  do  not 
know;  we  can  only  get  at  it  through  its  various  manifestations. 
Something  potent,  like  a  blind  will,  stirs  in  the  soil.  It  sends  up 
shoots  of  green,  it  grows  into  a  tree  with  trunk  and  bark  and  leaves 
and  branches.  It  towers  to  the  heavens,  by  and  by  it  droops  and 
decays  and  falls.  It  descends  to  mother  earth  again,  there  to  lie 
through  countless  years.  At  length  we  dig  it  up  in  hard  black  lumps ; 
we  place  fire  beneath  it  and  it  breaks  forth  in  flame,  and  flame  passes 
into  heat  and  the  heat  passes  out  again,  in  some  new  form  of 
invisible  power,  back  into  the  cosmos.  What  was  it,  moving,  urging, 
directing,  transforming  through  soil  and  sapling  and  tree  and  rotten 
wood  and  coal  and  heat  and  light  and  lire?  We  do  not  know.  But 
something,  the  real  thing,  which  alone  gave  significance  and  value  to 
all  this  process,  was  there.  Now  men  have  always  been  aware  of 
this  invisible  elusive  force  and  that  we  are  ever  moving  about  in 
worlds  not  realized ;  have  seen  that  behind  all  the  splendor  and 
energy  and  achievement  and  material  wonder  of  the  universe  is 
immaterial  and  unseen  spirit  directing  and  producing  it  all.  Some- 
times we  call  that  spirit  Nemesis  or  Fate;  sometimes  "the  Something 
not  ourselves  that  makes  for  Righteousness,"  most  often  we  call 
it  "God." 

And  side  by  side  with  this  high  sense  of  the  ''presence  that  dis- 
turbs us  with  the  joy  of  elevated  thoughts,"  is  the  sense  of  loneliness 
and  fear  and  estrangement  from  that  presence.  Between  the  two, 
the  Eternal  Spirit  unseen  but  felt,  and  the  hesitant  and  uncertain 
and  blinded  spirit  of  a  man,  there  would  seem  to  be  a  great  gulf  fixed. 
Our  world  has  already  been  a  searching  and  troubled  and  baffled 
world.  It  has  not  known  where  to  find  Him!  The  altars,  with  their 
smoking  sacrifices  upon  a  thousand  hills,  the  shrines  and  temples  and 
penances  and  pilgrimages,  all  bear  witness  to  the  human  sense  of  a 
divine  and  changeless  reality  and  the  human  inability  to  find  that 
reality  and  abide  in  peace  and  power  within  it.  To  put  all  this  in 
conventional  and  hence  comparatively  meaningless  phrases,  the  two 
universal  elements  in  religion — any  and  every  religion — are  the  sense 
of  sin  and  the  sense  of  God. 

Now  Christianity  is  the  particular  interpretation  and  completion 
of  this  experience  brought  into  the  world  by  Jesus  Christ.  First 
Jesus,  in  his  teaching  and  person,  proves  that  man's  dream  of  an 
eternal  and  Suijrenie   Being  is  true;  partly  because  he  teaches  so 


8  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

satisfying  and  adequate  a  conception  of  that  Being,  and  far  more 
because  he  Hves  out  in  a  human  life  the  nature  and  the  grace  of  God 
of  which  he  speaks.  This  is  what  we  mean  by  the  doctrine  of  the 
Incarnation,  by  the  sublime  name  for  Jesus,  Emanuel — *'God-with- 
us,"  by  saying  that  in  Him,  for  us  men  and  our  salvation,  God  is 
"made  manifest  in  the  flesh."  The  first  glad  message  of  Christianity 
is  that  in  Jesus  Christ  there  is  completely  revealed  for  us  the  char- 
acter of  God. 

Now  you  will  notice  just  what  I  said  there.  One  does  not  claim 
that  Jesus  knew  everything,  that  he  revealed  the  entire  mind  of  God, 
completely  transcending  the  intellectual  limitations  of  his  time  and 
place.  One  does  not  claim  that  he  was  a  supreme  aesthetic  genius, 
the  incarnation  of  final  and  eternal  beauty.  No  one  thinks  that  he 
fulfilled  the  speculative  ideas  of  deity;  that  he  was  "the  absolute," 
whatever  that  may  mean;  that  he  was  omniscient,  or  omnipresent, 
or  omnipotent.  So  far  as  I  know  no  first-rate  theologian  in  the 
Christian  church  has  ever  identified  Jesus  of  Nazareth  with  Deity. 
But  we  do  know,  out  of  two  thousand  years  of  experience,  that 
Jesus  does  reveal,  incarnate,  the  moral  nature  of  God,  that  in  Him 
God's  character,  of  long-suffering,  forgiving,  redeeming,  self-giving 
love  is  perfectly  revealed.  And  when  I  use  that  word  "perfectly" 
again  I  draw  from  the  misleading  vocabulary  of  the  absolute,  and 
I  can  only  mean  by  it  that  Jesus  sets  forth  wholly,  so  far  as  a  human 
being  can  understand  or  need  it,  what  the  heart  of  the  Eternal, 
the  motive,  the  passion,  the  purpose,  the  spirit  of  Deity  is.  "God" 
is  the  religious  term  for  the  ultimate;  we  think  of  the  ultimate  in 
the  realm  of  the  intellect  as  truth,  in  the  realm  of  feeling  as  beauty, 
in  the  realm  of  personality,  the  highest  and  most  inclusive  realm, 
as  God.  Now  there  is  but  one  adequate  idea  of  a  supreme  moral 
and  spiritual  being  in  the  world,  and  that  is  the  idea  of  a  Holy 
and  Righteous  Father,  making  his  sun  to  shine  on  the  evil  and  on  the 
good,  sending  his  rain  on  the  just  and  on  the  unjust,  giving  us  his 
love  not  according  to  our  desert  but  according  to  our  need,  more 
willing  to  hear  than  we  to  pray,  forever  forgiving  and  redeeming 
every  soul  that  returns  itself  to  him. 

This  is  the  sublime  idea  of  the  Christian  God  and  this  is  Jesus. 
His  teaching  he  derives  in  essence  from  the  j^ast,  it  completes  what 
the  great  prophets  of  his  race  had  begun.  But  he  supremely  em- 
powers and  proves  that  teaching  in  action.  The  idea  of  God  be- 
comes in  him  an  experience  of  (iod,  drawn  out  of  the  depths  and 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  9 

immensities  of  his  own  victorious  and  perfected  spirit.  Thus  when 
we  think  of  the  love  of  God,  we  think  of  the  love  of  Jesus — 
weeping  over  Jerusalem,  calling  little  children  unto  Him,  stooping 
with  infinite  gentleness  to  blind  Bartimeus,  blessing  beggar  and 
leper,  harlot  and  centurion,  publican  and  pharisee  alike.  And  when 
we  think  of  the  forgiving,  redeeming  grace  of  God  again  wc  think 
of  Jesus;  who  restored  her  self-respect  to  the  woman  taken  in 
adultery,  who  forgave  Peter  his  chsloyalty  and  cowardice,  who 
looked  upon  Zaccheus  and  believed  in  him  and  brought  him  back 
from  thievery  and  trickery  to  honor,  who  hung,  all  exposed  and 
helpless  upon  his  Cross,  an  innocent  victim,  and  asked  God  to 
pardon  the  men  who  put  Him  there! 

Here  then  is  the  first  reason  why  Jesus  holds  the  supreme 
place  in  our  religion.  He  incarnates  our  dream ;  he  makes  men 
know  and  see  the  living  God  in  his  own  person.  This  does  not 
mean  that  in  Him,  a  finite  being,  dwelt  the  fullness  of  the  infinite. 
That  is  manifestly  impossible,  and  if  it  were  possible,  it  would  be 
entirely  unintelligible  to  us.  And  he  would  have  been  the  first 
to  deny  it.  In  the  same  breath  in  which  he  said,  *T  and  my  Father 
are  one,"  which  was  true,  he  also  said,  "My  Father  is  greater  than 
I,"  which  was  true  too.  No  one  ever  so  looked  up  to  God,  so 
relinquished  himself  to  the  eternal  Being,  so  worshiped  and 
adored  the  Infinite  as  Jesus  did.  But  Jesus  was  one  in  essence 
with  the  Divine  Life.  Just  as  the  land-locked  bay  is  a  part  of  the 
ocean,  and  the  same  water  lies  within  and  without  the  headlands, 
and  in  the  bay  is  everything  of  the  quality  and  nature  of  the  far- 
flung  shining  sea,  so  the  ocean  of  Infinite  Being,  its  character  and 
gracious  power,  within  the  limits  of  a  human  personality,  was 
present  in  Jesus. 

And  that  brings  us  to  the  second  thing  in  Christianity.  If  Jesus 
takes  the  first  experience  of  the  race,  the  awareness  of  Eternal 
Spirit,  and  confirms  it  and  incarnates  it  in  character,  he  takes  the 
second  experience  also,  the  sense  of  uneasiness  and  estrangement, 
and  does  away  with  it,  shows  men  how  to  find  and  live  with  the 
Eternal,  reconciles  the  human  soul  to  its  Creator.  Now  we  are 
come  to  the  very  heart  of  the  Gospel— the  glad  tidings  of  great  joy 
for  all  people.  For  Jesus  lived  and  was  this  Divinity  in  a  veritable 
human  life,  and  that  for  the  express  purpose  that  through  and  by 
Him  all  men  might  see  and  know  that  they  could  live  it  too.  God 
forgives,    said   Jesus,    the    Lamb    was    slain    in    the   heart    of    the 


10  *  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

Eternal  from  the  foundation  of  the  world ;  He  has  never  turned 
himself  away  from  any  of  you;  you  have  but  to  turn  back  and  re- 
ceive his  grace  and  then  you  too  can  live  the  free  and  radiant  life ;  I 
am  here  to  proclaim,  to  prove  it,  to  die  for  it  that  you  may  believe. 
And  Jesus  does  prove  it !  For  his  life,  which  uttered  the  God-life, 
was  a  genuine  and  veritable  human  life.  He  was  not  "some  radiant 
god  who  might  despise  us  quite," — he  was  a  man.  He  felt,  he 
saw,  he  thought,  he  wondered,  he  lived  and  moved  just  as  do  you 
and  I.  He  knew  perplexity,  temptation,  discouragement,  failure ;  he 
understood  the  sorrow  and  the  loneliness  of  human  Hfe.  This 
potent,  ardent  life,  which  was  one  with  Deity  in  purity  and  deed 
and  purpose;  this  brave  and  generous  and  unsullied  heart,  which 
beat  in  steady  free  accord  with  the  heart  of  God,  was  in  a  man  like 
us.  The  revelation  of  the  character  of  God,  the  Incarnation,  is 
not  in  some  unique  unparalleled  different  order  of  being;  it  is  in 
our  Brother,  the  Elder  Brother  of  us  all. 

And  now  you  must  see  for  yourselves  what  it  is  that  religion  has 
to  offer — that  it  brings  indeed  the  supreme  and  ineffable  gift  to  us 
all.  For  this  revelation  in  Jesus  of  the  life  of  God  lived  in  a  human 
life,  as  the  true  life  of  man,  brought  a  new  power  into  history, 
wiped  out  the  terror  of  the  eternal,  made  men  know  that  they,  if 
they  will  believe  in  Jesus,  trust  him  and  follow  him,  can  be  godlike 
too.  This  is  the  most  wonderful  thing  about  Jesus;  his  life,  be- 
cause it  incarnates  the  vision,  enables  other  men  to  get  it  too.  You 
who  have  never  been  his  disciples,  you  who  love  to  find,  as  you 
so  easily  can,  much  in  the  Christian  Church  of  error  and  sin  and 
cowardice  and  obscurantism,  never  forget  this:  Christianity  isn't 
a  form  of  ideas,  a  doctrine,  a  creed,  a  philosophy,  an  ethic ;  it  isn't 
a  rich  tradition,  a  rite,  a  ceremony ;  it  is  a  moral  power,  a  spiritual 
force,  residing  in,  brought  to  us  by,  the  victorious  life  and  person  of 
our  Lord  Jesus  Christ. 

What  then  can  his  religion  do  for  you?  It  is  hard  to  answer  that 
question  adequately  before  this  audience  because  you  are  living, 
for  these  four  years,  in  an  unreal  world,  where  reality  is  obscured. 
This  is  a  well-ordered,  carefully  protected  homogeneous  and  highly 
educated  community,  representing  the  best  and  selected  spirits  out  of 
a  vast  multitude.  The  average  of  character  is  high,  the  measure  of 
success  is  large.  We  know  no  savage  struggle  for  existence, — de- 
corous, polished  and  comfortable  as  we  are.  Therefore  we  lose  the 
power  to  understand  the  conditions  of  the  outside  world,  we  have 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  ii 

lost  touch  with  llic  stark  realities,  tlic  brutal  facts,  the  elemental 
struggle  of  human  life.  But  all  around  this  sheltered  favored  spot 
lies  the  real  world  upon  which  this,  and  every  other  similar  com- 
munity depends.  You  must  look  at  that  real  world  if  you  want  to 
see  what  religion  means !  Here  is  the  laborer — let  us  say  the  farm- 
hand. His  hours  are  not  fixed  by  labor  unions ;  his  feet  are  blis- 
tered for  weeks  as  they  follow  the  plough,  his  bones  wake  him  for 
their  aching  of  a  night;  he  wears  unclean  garments,  he  works  and 
sleeps  with  unclean  malodorous  fellow  workmen.  He  has  little 
choice  of  food — his  body  is  under-nourished  and  dyspeptic,  he 
trembles,  always  trembles  inwardly  from  overexertion  and  exhaus- 
tion and  severe  heat.  There  is  little  or  no  probability  for  anything 
better  for  him  in  this  life.  But  this  man  has  heard  of  Jesus  and 
believes  in  him  and  loves  and  trusts  him.  His  very  soul  hangs  on 
Jesus.  He  keeps  saying  to  himself :  there  is  a  God  and  He  does 
know  and  care,  and  He  loves  me,  and  somewhere,  somehow  He 
will  make  it  all  up  to  me  if  I  only  believe  and  follow.  What  does 
religion  mean  to  your  brother,  the  day  laborer?  It  means  all  the 
difference  between  heaven  and  hell,  blank,  dull  misery  and  hope 
and  joy!  Here  is  the  little  nation  of  the  Belgians,  everything  des- 
troyed. The  ways  of  peace,  the  arts  of  industry  and  commerce, 
the  homes  of  learning,  the  houses  of  faith,  the  young  men  who 
should  have  been  the  begetters  of  the  coming  generation,  all  are 
laid  low.  Their  homes  are  burned,  their  land  made  waste.  But 
these  Belgians  have  heard  of  Jesus  and  the  God  of  Jesus.  Oh  the 
sublime  tragedy  and  wonder  of  it  that  all  over  that  stricken  land 
today  old  men  and  maidens,  young  men  and  children  are  lifting  up 
their  hands  to  the  wide  heavens  and  praying  not  cursing — saying: 
Our  Father  which  art  in  Heaven,  give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread ! 
What  can  religion  do  for  them?  It  can  turn  them  from  madness, 
from  despair,  to  humble  quietness  and  a  great  faith  and  hope.  It 
can  keep  life,  even  under  sucJi  conditions,  from  being  intolerable! 
And  what  can  it  do  for  you,  the  educated  youth  ?  Well,  here  is  a 
man  who  does  not  believe  there  is  a  God ;  but  we  look  at  Jesus  and 
we  have  to  believe  it  for  He  is  what  we  mean  by  God.  Or  here 
is  a  man  who  doesn't  believe  in  himself— the  evil  weight  of  the 
custom,  the  deadness  of  the  world  has  gripped  him.  There  isn't  any 
hope,  you  say,  that  I  can  love  our  human  life  again  and  be  made 
over!  And  then  we  look  at  Jesus,  tempted  in  all  points  like  as 
^ve  are — living  the  holy  joyous  life  among  the  unholy  and  making 


12  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

them  holy  too,  and  he  makes  us  dare  to  believe  that  we  can  try 
again.  Or  we  have  made  up  our  minds  that  the  only  things  in  life 
that  are  real  are  money  and  comfort  and  fame  and  power  and 
"success'' ;  that  the  only  principle  worth  striving  for  is  the  economic 
principle;  that  we  believe  in  the  survival  of  the  fittest,  and  we  are 
out  for  ourselves,  and  we  mean  to  come  out  on  top!  There  are 
many  men  in  this  college  who  have  given  themselves  up  to  just  that 
brutal  paganism.  And  then  we  look  at  Jesus  and  we  know  better, 
and  we  see  that  the  law  of  life  is  love  not  might,  service  not  con- 
quest, that  manhood  means  to  save  not  to  exploit.  We  see  that 
we  are  selling  our  souls  for  silver,  that  even  youth  will  do  that 
and  we  are  ready  to  die  for  shame  and  we  abhor  ourselves,  and 
once  more  our  true  manhood  rises  in  awe  and  tears  out  of  our 
repentant  souls  and  Jesus  has  brought  us  to  ourselves ! 

Or  we  have  given  up  all  thought  of  a  morally  victorious  life ;  we 
are  used  to  sin ;  to  cheating  and  lying  and  gambling  and  drunken- 
ness and  impurity — hundreds  of  us  are  used  to  just  these  things. 
We  accept  it  dully  as  a  matter  of  course,  and  then  again  we  look 
at  Jesus.  He  lives  his  life  under  just  as  hard,  yea  harder  conditions 
than  ours,  and  he  never  gives  in;  he  always  holds  to  the  light  and 
peace  of  moral  victory.  And  he  stretches  out  his  hand,  across 
the  chasm  of  the  years  to  us,  yes!  even  to  us,  saying,  "Come 
brother,  come !  Don't  be  afraid.  Get  up  and  be  a  man !  Lo,  I  am 
with  you  alway  even  unto  the  end  of  the  world!"  Then,  seeing  his 
gracious  radiant  figure,  great  tides  of  love  and  sorrow  rise  in 
our  miserable  hearts  and  we  say,  "O  God!  that's  not  for  me!"  and 
Jesus  always  answers,  "Yes!  for  you!"  And  we  say  "O  God,  for- 
give and  help  me,  O  Jesus,  I  come,  I  come !"  And  by  that  flood  of 
pure  emotion  the  old  channels  in  the  brain  are  washed  away  and 
new  ones  begin  to  form  and  Christ  becomes  for  us,  as  for  all  the 
world,  the  sanctuary  of  our  broken  humanity! 

Do  you  not  see  then  what  religion  has  to  ofifer  you,  the  educated 
man,  you,  who  just  because  of  a  developed  and  enriched  personality 
must  often  fight  the  harder  with  the  sins  of  the  flesh  and  the  sins  of 
the  spirit?  Don't  you  see  how  real  and  simple  and  possible  it  all  is? 
There's  nothing  arbitrary  or  mechanical  in  that  redemption ;  nothing 
out  of  the  uniform  moral  order;  no  scheme,  no  transaction,  no 
petty,  mysterious  device.  It  is  sublime ;  but  it  is  all  natural,  all 
possible,  all  real.  Surely  you  do  want  it !  "Come  unto  Him  all  ye 
that  labor  and  are  heavy  laden.    He  will  give  you  rest!" 


II 

WHY  MEN  LOSE  THEIR  IvMTII  IX  COLLEGE 

We  did  not  truly  accomplish  anything  last  night  unless  the  ad- 
dress brought  home  to  us  the  naturalness  and  the  normality  of  the 
religious  life.  Indeed  the  chief  purpose  of  that  initial  talk  was  to 
make  clear  how  veritable  and  precious  are  the  gifts  religion  Ijrings 
and  how  deep-seated  and  universal  the  instincts  which  it  interprets. 
Far  from  being  something  repressive  and  ascetic,  something  arbi- 
trary, mysterious,  unpleasant,  imposed  upon  a  man's  life,  we  saw 
it  to  be  rather  a  profound  and  joyous  interpretation  of  the  central 
forces  and  the  deepest  needs  within  life.  It  may  therefore  surprise 
some  of  us  that  we  should  devote  this  evening  to  dealing  with  the 
difficulties  of  belief,  since  we  have  already  spent  an  hour  in  trying 
to  show  how  intelligible  to  the  mind  and  how  grateful  to  the  spirit 
religion  is. 

Yet  this  is  the  very  reason  why  we  must  examine  the  other  side 
of  the  shield  now.  The  religious  life  was  presented  from  one  point 
of  view  last  night  and  the  facts  of  experience  given  only  tlieir  re- 
ligious interpretation.  And  it  would  be  unfair  to  you  if  the  oppos- 
ing,— the  non-religious  interpretation  of  experience — were  not  also 
frankly  stated  here.  For  to  acquire  and  maintain  a  great  religious 
faith  is  not  simple  or  easy  for  many  clear  thinking  men  ;  indeed  few 
things  in  human  life,  that  are  worth  anything,  can  be  gained  except 
through  much  struggle  and  effort,  many  battlings  with  our  doubts 
and'  fears.  Discipleship  of  Jesus  is,  to  be  sure,  a  blessedly  simple 
matter  of  the  good  will,  the  repentant,  loving,  trusting  heart ;  and 
when  will  and  heart  have  been  really  given  to  his  keeping  the 
truth  of  His  teaching  and  His  person  is  revealed  and  verified  in  the 
changed  life  and  experience.  But  that  initial  decision,  that  first 
step  of  faith,  which,  like  all  first  steps,  costs — is  often  hard  enough 
to  take,  simple  as  it  is,  because  Jesus'  interpretation  of  human  ex- 
perience, his  revelation  and  Incarnation  of  the  Divine  Spirit  cer- 
tainly have  to  face  many  things  in  human  life  and  many  aspects 
of  the  natural  world  which  make  them  difficult  of  acceptance 
And  it  is  of  these  things  that  we  must  now  speak. 


14  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

But  first,  let  us  bear  our  witness  against  two  wide-spread  falla- 
cies which  are  wrapped  up  in  this  whole  matter  of  undergraduate 
doubt.  It  is  not,  for  instance,  true  that  men  lose  their  faith  in 
college  because  the  college  itself  is  a  godless  place.  On  the  con- 
trary there  are  few,  if  any,  places  in  this  country  where  ethical 
and  spiritual  leadership  is  clearer  and  stronger  than  in  our  schools 
and  universities.  More  and  more  the  moral  and  religious  forces 
of  the  nation  are  centering  in  them.  No  one  who  knows  the 
college  from  the  inside  fails  to  understand  that  there  is  probably 
no  place  where  it  is  easier  to  do  right  and  harder  to  do  wrong  than 
here.  When  you  reflect  upon  the  low  level  of  conversation,  manners, 
standards,  outlook,  which  your  brothers  who  are  not  collegians 
have  to  meet  in  commercial  and  industrial  life,  in  the  shop  and 
factory  and  market  and  street,  then  you  realize  how  favorable  for 
faith  and  character  is  your  environment  here.  You  can  never 
excuse  yourself  for  your  wrong  doing  by  falling  back  upon  the 
"great  temptations"  of  college  life.  It  must,  on  the  other  hand,  be 
a  sobering  and  humiliating  fact  to  realize  that  if  here,  under  such 
comparatively  ideal  conditions,  life  slips  out  of  moral  self-control, 
how  much  worse  is  it  likely  to  be  when  you  leave  these  sheltering 
academic  walls.  No!  a  man  who  goes  to  the  bad  here  does  so  in 
spite  of  the  college  not  because  of  it! 

Again  it  is  not  true  that  undergraduates  lose  their  faith  because 
men  of  your  age  are  naturally,  irreligious.  On  the  contrary  if 
history  proves  anything,  it  proves  that  young  men  are  profoundly 
and  instinctively  religious.  No  one  is  more  interested  in  funda- 
mental experience,  more  desirous  of  attacking  the  insoluble  prob- 
lems ;  the  world's  great  religious  leaders  have  been,  for  the  most 
part,  young  men.  It  is  true  that  youth  has  a  ruthless  passion  for 
reality  and  that  it  will  not  be  satisfied  with  any  religion  whose 
inherent  reasonableness  it  cannot  perceive.  But  to  say  that  you 
are  irreligious  is  fundamental  heresy.  It  needs  no  argument  to 
show  that  we  come  into  the  morning  of  life  "trailing  clouds  of  glory 
from  Heaven  our  native  place"  and  that  then  we  are  very  keenly 
aware  of  all  there  is  in  heaven  and  earth  that  our  philosophy  has 
never  dreamed  of ! 

No!  the  reason  for  our  acute  religious  doubts  and  fears  is  more 
fundamental  than  these.  It  is  incidental  to,  inseparable  from,  the 
whole  process  of  quick  transition  from  youth  to  manhood  which 
the  college  course  accomplishes.     You  are  now  come  to  that  place 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  15 

where  you  must  pass  over  from  obedience  to  freedom ;  from  a 
faith  which  comes  from  without  to  the  faith  that  is  born  within; 
here  you  give  up  second-hand  experiences  inherited  from  home 
and  school  and  the  past,  and  gain  first-hand  ones  for  yourselves. 
It  is  this  whole  precious  but  perilous  process  of  piercing  beneath 
form  to  substance,  beneath  expression  to  reality  which,  in  any 
department  of  human  living,  and  nowhere  so  much  so  as  here, 
disturbs  old  faiths  and  calls  for  a  readjustment  of  positions.  The 
first  great  reason  why  faith  declines  here  is  because  of  the  difficulty 
of  squaring  an  inherited  religion  with  the  new  and  overwhelming 
accession  of  fresh  views  and  facts  which  the  college  course  brings. 

Now  that  difficulty  will  usually  take  one  of  three  forms.  If  a 
man  studies  natural  science  here,  and  no  one  can  be  educated 
today  and  not  study  it,  he  will  at  once  perceive  that  the  religious 
interpretation  of  life,  which  declares  that  the  highest  and  only 
right  law  of  conduct  is  the  law  of  loving  and  unselfish  and  sacri- 
ficial service  runs  directly  counter  to  the  natural  law  of  conquest, 
of  self-gratification,  of  the  surv'ival  of  the  fittest.  You  see  that  the 
law  of  the  physical  universe  appears  to  be  the  law  of  doing  the 
easiest,  the  most  obvious  things.  The  suns  and  stars  and  planets 
do  not  swing  in  perfect  orbits,  in  correct  circles.  On  the  contrary 
they  follow  that  somewhat  deviating  and  crooked  course  in  which 
the  balancing  and  counteracting  influences  of  other  suns  and  planets 
leaves  the  least  resistance.  You  see  that  the  beginnings  of  human 
life  came  about  through  the  operation  of  this  same  law  that  might 
is  right;  that  the  man  who  has  superior  strength  or  cunning  or 
genius  always  comes  out  on  top.  You  see  the  early  primitive 
groups  maintaining  their  corporate  integrity  over  against  other 
similar  groups,  not  by  disciplining  or  purifying  their  natural  fierce, 
cruel  and  lustful  desires,  but  by  a  splendidly  aggressive,  magnifi- 
cently brutal  exploitation  of  them.  You  also  see  that  this  pagan 
law  of  ruthless  conquest,  physical  pleasure  and  material  might  is 
still  the  dominating  principle  of  most  of  our  present  life.  And 
you  say  "All  this  gives  the  lie  to  Christianity;  human  existence 
and  progress  depend  upon  the  law  which  is  the  very  opposite  of 
gentleness  and  love !" 

Well,  it  is  true  that  human  life  begins  at  the  level  and  very  like 
unto  the  life  of  the  brute.  It  is  true  that  in  the  beginning  might 
is  right  and  restraint  means  hindrance,  and  men  give  rein  to  im- 
pulse and  passion.     But  it  is  also  true  that  after  human  life  has 


i6  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

risen  to  a  comparatively  low  level  the  whole  process  changes  and 
that  thereafter  progress  and  civilization  and  human  happiness  are 
found  only  as  we  thwart  cosmic  law,  oppose  it,  supplant  it  with 
a  higher  principle.  Read  Huxley's  Evolution  and  Ethics  and  see 
how  he  answers  that  question  once  for  all !  It  is  a  matter  of 
incontestable  fact  that  every  great  forward  step  in  civilization  has 
come  when  men  have  had  the  courage  and  the  insight  to  accept 
Jesus'  declaration  that  only  in  unselfish  and  helpful  and  sacrificial 
living  are  real  joys,  permanent  rewards,  and  true  progress  to  be 
found.  Nearly  all  the  characteristic  modern  expressions  of  the 
communal  life,  the  hospital  which  perpetuates  the  survival  of  the 
unfit,  the  reformatory  which  is  replacing  the  prison,  the  old  age 
pensions,  the  minimum  wage  laws,  the  determined  attacks  upon 
the  sex  and  drink  traf^c — all  these  are  witnesses  that  Jesus  was 
right  in  bidding  men  accept  a  religious  life  and  a  spiritual  law 
which  does  indeed  oppose  and  supplant  natural  law  but,  by  so 
doing,  brings  freedom  and  peace  and  power  into  human  life.  The 
natural  law,  if  allowed  to  work  unchecked,  brings  civilization  back 
to  barabarism  and  destruction,  plunges  men  in  blood  and  tears  as 
Europe  is  plunged  now.  But  the  law  of  the  repentant  and  purified 
and  loving  spirit  lifts  men  above  the  brute  and  above  the  body 
and  gives  the  durable  satisfactions,  the  deeper  and  more  necessary 
delights.  The  history  of  civilization  proves  Jesus  right ;  the  verdict 
of  experience  is  for  religion,  not  against  it.  All  that  you  count 
most  precious  in  life,  your  homes,  your  father's  care,  your  mother's 
love;  all  that  this  great  University  is  giving  you  so  lavishly  is 
yours  because  Jesus  has  begun  to  conquer  the  natural  law  and 
the  natural  world  and  made  men  see  that  it  is  more  blessed  to 
give  than  to  receive  and  that  gentleness,  honor,  service,  purity  are 
more  real,  more  valuable  than  everything  and  anything  else  the 
world  can  give. 

But  there  is  another  aspect  of  human  life,  which,  when  we 
really  come  to  know  it  for  ourselves,  makes  religion  dif^cult  of 
acceptance.  If  there  is  a  God,  and  He  be  a  God  of  long-sufTering 
redeeming  self-giving  love,  then  why  is  our  world  so  unlike  what 
we  should  expect  such  a  God  to  enjoy  and  make?  For  our  world 
is  full  of  injustice,  sorrow,  cruelty.  There  is  inexpressible  loneli- 
ness and  painful  eflfort  in  every  human  life.  So  many  high  am- 
bitious and  pure  hopes  and  just  desires  are  withered.  Life  has 
so  many  withheld  completions.     Children  sufTer,  women  weep,  the 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  17 

innocent  are  punished,  the  guilty  go  free!  Tlie  world  looks  either 
as  if  there  was  not  a  God  or  that  He  did  not  care!  Is  it  not  all 
just  a  great  machine,  that  has  no  intelligence,  no  interest,  no  feeling; 
are  not  all  our  hopes  and  fears  and  visions  and  despairs  just 
curious  reactions  of  the  chemistry  of  our  physical  being? 

That  here  are  real  difficulties  with  belief  no  intelligent  man 
could  doubt,  no  honest  man  deny.  But  there  are  real  and  abiding 
difficulties  with  any  view  of  the  world  and  it  seems  to  us  that, 
great  as  are  the  difficulties  of  belief  in  Jesus  and  His  Gospel,  the 
difficulties  of  unbelief  are  yet  greater.  There  is  so  much  in  men 
that  is  godlike;  the  most  valuable  and  permanent  things  in  life 
which  can't  be  explained  unless  you  trace  them  back  to  an  eternal 
and  beneficent  spirit.  The  noble  army  of  martyrs,  the  prophets, 
the  saints,  the  reformers — these  are  living  witnesses  to  the  reality 
of  God  and  the  religious  life,  in  spite  of  all  that  we  cannot  under- 
stand. All  the  moral  strife  and  spiritual  agony  of  the  world;  all 
the  men  who  have  given  up  their  breath  for  love,  their  lives  for 
an  idea — they  are  inexplicable,  utterly  non-understandable  unless 
you  believe  as  Jesus  did,  and  then  they  and  their  lives  are  clear. 
Moreover  in  the  world  of  religion,  as  in  any  other  world,  we 
have  a  right  to  rely  upon  expert  testimony.  If  I  want  the  truth 
about  nature  I  go  to  a  great  scientist;  if  I  want  judgment  on  a 
painting  I  seek  out  the  famous  artist.  If  I  want  expert  testimony 
in  religion,  I  don't  go  to  scientists  or  artists  for  it.  They  are 
merely  laymen  in  religion.  But  I  go  to  the  supreme  religious 
genuises  of  our  race  as  is  the  only  logical  or  fair  or  intelligent 
thing  to  do.  And  I  find  that  an  overwhelming  proportion  of  their 
number  are  triumphantly  sure  of  the  living,  gracious  God  and 
the  reality  of  the  spiritual  world.  With  Jesus,  who  towers  high 
over  them  all,  stand  Amos,  and  Hosea  and  Isaiah  and  Jeremiah 
and  Paul  and  John  and  Augustin  and  Luther  and  Calvin  and 
Edwards  and  Brooks.  These  are  our  seers.  They  are  sure  of 
God',  as  Jesus  was  sure.  With  them  and  Him  we  rest  our  case. 
And  besides  all  this  the  great  and  living  minds  of  other  nations 
and  other  faiths,  Socrates  and  Plato,  Emerson,  the  high  and  gentle 
Buddha — all  these  have  had  the  vision  of  the  Infinite  as  well, 
and  their  lives  stand  with  ours,  their  experience  tallies  with  the 
teaching  and  the  life  of  our  Saviour. 

Again,  the  sudden  expansion  of  knowledge,  the  rapid  develop- 
ment of  intelligence  which  college  life  brings,  forces  another  issue 


i8  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

to  the  front.  It  makes  us  see  that  many  of  our  intellectual  state- 
ments of  religion  are  outgrown.  They  are  written  in  obsolete 
language,  or  they  were  framed  from  a  point  of  view  regarding 
the  universe  which  is  no  longer  generally  held;  they  need  revision, 
enlargement,  emendation.  And  seeing  thus  that  our  theology  is 
faulty  and  inadequate  we  confound  it,  identify  it  with  the  religion  of 
which  theology  is  only  an  expression ;  and  if  we  have  to  discard  one 
we  throw  away  the  other  too.  Here  is  one  of  the  commonest 
causes  of  religious  difficulty.  We  fail  to  get  clear  the  fundamental 
distinction  between  religion  which  is  an  art,  a  way  of  life,  an 
experience,  and  theology  which  is  merely  the  science  of  that  art. 
Theology  is  to  religion  what  botany  is  to  flowers,  or  astronomy  is 
to  the  stars.  The  stars  and  flowers  do  not  essentially  change,  al- 
though their  respective  sciences  are  constantly  changing.  So  it 
is  with  theology  and  religion.  Some  one  has  said  that  the  history 
of  theology  is  nothing  but  a  long  record  of  discarded  errors.  It 
was  said,  I  fancy,  as  an  indictment;  it  is  really  highest  praise.  Of 
course  the  science  of  religion,  if  it  be  vital  and  potent,  will  be 
fluid  and  progressive  and  always  advancing  into  new  truth.  A 
stationary  science  is  a  dead  science;  the  crowning  tragedy  for 
theology  would  be  the  arbitrary  fixing  of  its  philosophy  of  religion 
in  creeds  and  formulae  which  should  never  change.  What  is 
the  history  of  medicine  or  physics  or  chemistry  or  astronomy  or 
philosophy  except  a  long  and  honorable  record  of  discarded  errors? 
No  man  then,  who  has  a  real  and  precious  religious  experience 
should  be  surprised  or  alarmed  if  his  idea  of  it,  his  intellectual 
expression  of  it  changes  considerably  during  the  expansive  period 
of  these  four  college  years.  Indeed  it  is  your  duty,  as  educated  men 
to  do  your  part,  as  in  every  age  great  men  have  done  theirs,  in 
freeing  religion  from  outworn  or  outgrown  statements,  in  relating 
it  to  the  modern  world  and  that  view  of  the  universe  which  obtains 
in  your  generation.  That  which  is  most  marvellous  and  most  as- 
suring about  the  Christian  message  is  that  it  has  shown,  during 
these  nineteen  hundred  years,  an  amazing  comprehensiveness  and  an 
exquisite  adaptability.  You  must  ally  yourselves  with  the  spiritual 
pioneers,  the  religious  leaders  of  the  other  generations  and  do  what 
they  did,  what  Paul  and  Augustin  and  Luther  did,  take  the  truth 
which  is  eternal  and  restate  it  in  the  language  of  the  moment,  giving 
it  such  emphases  and  applications  as  our  needs  and  our  vision  may 
demand. 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  19 

But  after  all.  the  reasons  why  the  larp^er  number  of  men  lose 
their  faith  in  college  are,  I  think,  personal  and  moral.  Often  and 
often  a  man  will  make  intellectual  skepticism  the  mere  cloak  or 
excuse  for  moral  wrong  doing.  Or  he  will  lose  his  faith  in  God 
because  he  has  deliberately  denied  the  divine  spirit  within  him- 
self and  lost  his  own  self-respect.  One  of  the  most  certain  and 
dreadful  effects  of  deliberate  sin  is  moral  and  spiritual  blindness. 
There  is  a  very  solemn  word  of  the  Lord  Jesus  to  the  effect  that 
only  the  pure  in  heart  can  see  God!  If  there  are  men  here  who 
are  not  living  the  lives  they  ought  to  live  of  course  they  cannot 
believe!  You  are  afraid  to  believe;  what  is  even  worse  you  are 
losing  the  capacity  to  believe!  And  how  shall  you  recover  your 
faith?  You  must  get  down  on  your  knees  before  God  and  say: 
*'0  God  I  am  ashamed :  I  pray  to  be  forgiven,  I  will  give  up  my 
sin,  hear  me  for  Jesus'  sake."  If  you  will  do  that  you  will  get  back 
your  faith  again  because  God  Himself,  his  peace  and  freedom 
and  power  will  flow  back  into  your  lives. 

Again  men  lose  their  faith  merely  because  they  won't  exercise 
it.  If  you  learn  to  play  upon  the  piano  and  then  never  touch 
a  piano  for  ten  years  you  will  find  you  have  lost  the  power  to  play ; 
there  is  nothing  surprising  in  that.  If  you  learn  how  to  exercise 
and  then  stop  walking  and  jumping  and  running,  your  muscles  will 
go  flabby,  what  else  could  you  expect?  And  yet  there  are  men  who 
come  every  day  to  me  and  say  that  they  haven't  any  interest  in 
religion,  that  it  has  no  power  or  meaning  for  them  and  they  imply 
that  this  is  an  indictment  of  religion.  And  when  I  ask  them  if 
they  read  the  Bible,  why  no !  or  if  they  really  and  regularly  pray, 
why  no !  or  if  they  think  much  on  serious  and  absorbing  moral  and 
spiritual  themes,  why  no!  Then  why  should  you  expect  to  enjoy 
religion  or  to  know  its  power?  You  have  atrophied  your  religious 
capacity  through  disuse.  You  will  never  gain  more  faith  till  you 
exercise  fully  all  you  now  have ;  you  will  lose  even  that,  as  sure  as 
sure  can  be,  unless  you  pay  attention  to  it  and  develop  it.  A  man 
must  work  at  his  religion  as  he  would  work  at  any  other  serious 
and  vital  matter. 

And  finally,  men  lose  their  faith  because  they  see  so  much  cold- 
ness and  disloyalty  and  inconsistency  among  professing  Christian 
men  and  women,  and  this  makes  the  observer  cynical  and  hard. 
Yet  there  is  very  much  less  of  cant  and  priggishness  and  hypocrisy 
in  our  human  world  than  the  youthful  onlookers  think.     We  are 


20  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

all  inconsistent,  whether  within  or  without  the  church,  and  all  fall 
far  below  what  might  justly  be  expected  of  us.  But  for  my  part  at 
any  rate,  I  am  more  impressed  with  the  moral  heroism,  the  per- 
sistent dogged  struggle  of  men  towards  the  light,  often  under 
dreadful  handicaps  of  inheritance  and  environment  than  I  am 
with  their  back  sliding.  And  you  and  I,  if  we  want  a  man's  job, 
would  better  come  inside  the  church,  come  into  the  company  of 
those  who  believe,  and  try  to  help  rather  than  stand  outside  and 
condemn  and  scorn.  And  let  this  be  our  last  word  to-night.  We 
have  honestly  confessed  that  there  are  difficulties  with  belief  as 
there  are  difficulties  with  anything  in  our  human  world.  Yet  we 
think  the  difficulties  of  unbelief  are  greater.  This  at  least  is  cer- 
tain. Any  man  who  with  perfect  freedom  and  integrity  faces  his 
own  world — who  looks  the  facts  and  all  the  facts  and  nothing  but 
the  facts  squarely  in  the  face  need  find  nothing  there  that  makes 
faith  impossible.  Faith  is  indeed  an  achievement,  a  glorious 
achievement.  But  what  rewards  it  offers  in  the  moral  victory  and 
the  spiritual  dignity  which  it  bestows  upon  human  life!  Why 
not,  then,  try  to  achieve,  through  the  message  and  the  grace  of 
Jesus,  a  high  place  among  the  followers  and  servants  of  the  living 
God? 


Ill 

WHAT  IS  "SALVATION"  AND   DO   I   WANT   IT? 

We  are  come  tonight  to  the  first  distinctively  religious  meeting 
of  this  series.  No  man,  who  is  himself  possessed  of  experience 
and  power,  has  a  right  to  impose  his  belief  upon  younger,  inex- 
perienced and  plastic  lives  or  to  try  to  bring  them  to  his  own  con- 
victions until  he  has  first  dealt  in  all  sincerity  and  candor  with  the 
practical  problems  and  intellectual  difficulties  which  he  has  en- 
countered. This  we  have  been  trying  to  do  in  the  two  preceding 
lectures,  and  now,  therefore,  we  have  a  right  to  discuss  together 
as  disciples  and  believers  the  content  of  religion  itself. 

Now  the  Christian  doctrine  of  salvation  starts  with  that  striving 
after  God,  but  that  inability  to  find  Him  and  feel  reconciled  to  him, 
concerning  which  I  spoke  in  my  first  lecture.  If  there  is  anybody 
here  who  does  not  know  what  that  desire  for  God  and  that  discon- 
tent with  oneself  without  him  is  then  such  a  man  can  get  nothing 
from  this  evening's  discussion.  The  first  condition  of  being  able 
to  appropriate  the  peace  and  power  of  religion  is  greatly  to  desire  it, 
to  know  that  it  has  something  to  olYer  which  we  cannot  do  without. 
It  is  Jesus'  own  teaching  that  nothing  can  be  done  for  the  man  who 
is  already  satisfied  with  himself.  Not  even  our  Lord,  were  He  here 
in  person,  could  make  religion  either  real  or  desirable  to  any  of 
you  who  feel  that  already  you  have  everything  that  you  want  in 
life,  who  are  perfectly  contented  with  your  present  moral  and  per- 
sonal situation.  Such  a  life,  complacent  and  self-satisfied,  has 
already  gone  down  into  death,  and  there  it  will  remain  until  some 
one  of  the  many  shocks  of  fate,  some  great  sorrow  or  disappointment 
or  sin  awakens  it  to  his  own  helplessness  and  its  own  desperate 
situation.  I  pray  there  may  not  be  many  such  men  here  tonight; 
yet  even  in  the  days  of  our  youth  it  is  possible  for  men  to  be  made 
thus  blind  and  dumb  and  deaf  by  their  own  spiritual  dullness  and 
crass  self-satisfaction. 

I  speak  then  to  the  men  who  feel  the  need  of  a  God.  but  who 
do  not  know  how  to  find  him ;  men,  who,  whether  or  not  they  would 
use  the  conventional  phraseology,  know  themselves  to  be  sinners. 


22  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

And  first  I  should  like  to  describe  the  various  sorts  of  ways  in 
which  this  sense  of  sin  comes  to  men  that  we  may  all  understand 
tonight  just  where  we  stand  and  who  of  us  are  included  in  the  num- 
ber of  those  who  need  salvation. 

The  first  great  group  of  sinners  in  college  are  those  who  have 
been  bound  hand  and  foot  by  the  sins  of  ignorance.  If  there  be  any- 
thing which  might  well  call  forth  the  compassion  of  our  Divine 
Redeemer,  it  is  these  sins  of  ignorance  with  their  uncomprehended 
meaning  and  results.  The  restlessness  of  unexpressed  and  unintelli- 
gible powers  besets  a  youth.  It  flushes  his  cheek,  it  excites  his 
nerves,  it  fills  his  mind  with  strange,  vague,  fascinating  dreams. 
Sometimes  these  primitive  instincts  tempt  him  to  deeds  whose  sig- 
nificance he  cannot  know.  Sometimes  they  fasten  upon  him  abnor- 
mal or  indulgent  habits  of  mind  and  Hfe  when  he  is  scarcely  aware 
of  what  a  habit  is.  So  it  comes  about  that  in  the  very  morning 
of  life,  when  a  man  should  be  happiest  and  freest,  he  has  the  rest- 
less hand,  the  averted  look,  the  things  which  he  must  conceal,  dark- 
ness in  his  eyes!  Are  there  many  of  us  who  do  not  know  these 
sins  of  ignorance  in  youth  and  the  moral  disintegration,  the  breaking 
down  of  self-respect,  the  divided  personality  which  follows  from 
them?  Surely  those  of  us  who  do  know  them  want  salvation,  do 
we  not  ? 

Again,  there  are  the  men  in  college  who  are  obsessed  by  the  sins 
of  passion.  These  men  have  come  to  their  physical  and  intellectual 
majority.  They  know  what  they  are  about  and  are  aware  of  the 
significance  of  their  deeds,  but  the  imperious  forces  of  an  un- 
bridled temper,  or  of  an  unexhausted  or  insatiable  appetite,  the 
ever  accumulating  and  mounting  tides  of  hungry  desires  seem  to 
sweep  them,  in  spite  of  themselves,  off  their  feet.  We  cannot  forget 
the  ancient  tale,  come  down  to  us  from  the  childhood  of  the  race, 
which  conceives  of  sin  as  crouching  at  the  door  ever  ready  to  spring 
upon  us  unawares.  The  eager  eye,  the  vigorous  mind,  the  blood 
singing  in  the  veins  almost  perforce  catch  contagion  from  that 
world  of  passion  which  lies  in  wait  to  prey  on  youth.  Is  it  not 
true,  my  brothers,  that  sometimes  our  lives  are  driven  by  the  fierce 
gales  of  temptation  right  upon  the  jagged  rock  of  some  great  sin? 
Sometimes  a  life  that  has  seemed  strong  and  fair  goes  down  right 
in  our  midst,  does  it  not,  and  shocks  us  with  its  irremediable  catas- 
trophe? And  such  lives  let  us  see  what  passions  and  what  fights 
with  passion  leap  and   rage  beneath   the  decorous  and   mannered 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  23 

surface  of  our  lives.  Because  before  these  lives  went  under,  for 
many  a  week  and  month  they  must  have  been  beset  lives,  battling  in 
their  turn  with  the  age-old  sins.  Before  that  final  and  pitiable  ruin 
they  must  have  been  drifting  and  struggling,  driven  and  fighting, 
sin  drawing  nearer  and  nearer,  their  fated  lives  apparently  urged  on, 
the  steering  of  their  own  lives  wrested  from  their  hands.  And  there 
must  have  been  the  sense  of  coming  danger,  the  dark  presentiment  of 
how  it  all  must  end,  the  dreadful  sense  of  life  drifting  toward  a  great 
crash,  of  being  upon  the  edge  of  the  wreck  of  all  things.  I  have  no 
doubt  that  there  are  young  men  in  this  house  tonight,  who,  in  this 
day's  very  hours  have  been  putting  forth  their  desperate,  sombre, 
half -mechanical  efforts  to  hold  these  mounting,  leaping  passions  until 
the  darkness  and  helplessness  shall  lessen  and  something  or  some- 
one shall  give  them  peace.  Surely  you  men  need  salvation?  Von 
would  like  to  believe  in  it ! 

And  again  there  are  men  here  who  are  given  over  to  the  sins  of 
deliberate  intent.  As  I  speak  of  this  class  of  sinners  we  enter  another 
world.  You  are  the  men  who  have  stopped  fighting,  who  have  sur- 
rendered, who  accept  your  sins,  who  may  even  acknowledge  and 
boast  of  them.  Such  a  sinner  was  Gehazi,  who  stood  before  his 
master  and  gazing  into  his  face  with  unwinking  stare  lied,  saying: 
"Thy  servant  went  no  whither."  Such  a  sinner  was  Hazael,  who 
although  warned  by  the  prophet  of  the  sin  he  was  about  to  commit, 
went  from  Elisha's  presence  into  the  bed-chamber  of  the  King  and 
taking  a  thick  cloth  and  wetting  it,  laid  it  on  his  master's  face  and 
choked  him  till  he  died.  Such  a  sinner  was  that  woman  spoken  of 
in  the  Book  of  Proverbs,  who,  after  her  defilement,  would  wipe 
her  mouth  and  say — I  have  done  no  harm.  And  such  was  Cain 
who  slew  his  brother.  Such  brazen  and  deliberate  sinners,  this 
and  every  other  great  university  holds.  Because  in  these  previous 
lectures  I  have  spoken  to  you  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  natural 
generosity  and  ethical  idealism  of  youth,  do  you  therefore  suppose 
that  I  am  not  aware  of  the  men  here  who  in  cold  blood  encourage 
others  to  initiate  themselves  in  reprehensible  practices,  who  ridi- 
cule and  embarrass  their  comrades  who  are  trying  to  stand  steadfast 
in  the  right  ?  There  are  men  here  who  deliberately  tempt  the  weak, 
who  incite  others  to  partnership  in  evil.  Have  you  forgotten  what 
Jesus  said?  *Tt  needs  must  be  that  oflfenses  come,  but  woe  to  him 
through  whom  the  offense  cometh."  There  are  men  who,  so  to 
speak,  hold  their  sins  in  their  hands,  steadfastly  regard  them  and 


24  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

gloat  over  them,  anticipate  their  enjoyment,  look  forward  to  the 
night  of  gambling,  dwell  in  delight  upon  the  proposed  debauch,  are 
eager  for  the  coming  week-end  and  its  secret  shame  and  shameful 
secrecy  in  the  great  city  yonder!  Do  you  not  think,  you  who  are 
this  sort  of  men,  in  the  moments  of  shame  and  agony  and  remose, 
which  still  come  to  you  at  times,  do  you  not  think  you  would  like 
to  know  what  salvation  is?  Would  you  not  like  to  get  it  and  be 
men  again  and  free? 

And  finally,  for  you  see  I  am  taking  this  list  of  sins  in  ascending 
order,  putting  the  worst  last,  there  are  the  sins  of  the  spirit,  which 
so  many  men  who  have  conquered  the  sins  of  the  flesh,  permit  to 
enslave  and  dehumanize  their  lives.  It  rather  frightens  us  to  remem- 
ber how  much  harder  was  Jesus  Christ  upon  these  sins  of  the  spirit 
that  he  ever  was  upon  the  other  sins.  He  saved  her  self-respect 
for  the  woman  taken  in  adultery,  he  took  back  into  his  comradeship 
the  cowardly  and  disloyal  but  repentant  Peter,  but  he  said — woe  unto 
you  scribes  and  pharisees,  how  shall  ye  expect  to  escape  the  damna- 
tion of  Hell !  Now  the  scribes  and  pharisees,  do  you  hear,  the 
scribes  and  pharisees,  are  here  tonight.  They  are  the  profoundly 
selfish  men,  carelessly  using  their  fathers  and  their  mothers  and  the 
money  and  the  faith  they  give,  abusing  the  university  and  the  treas- 
ures that  it  offers,  indifferent  to  the  rights  of  others,  exploiting  life 
not  consecrating  it,  loving  themselves  and  careless  of  their  world. 
They  are  the  men  who  are  sunk  in  dreadful  self-complacency,  who 
are  puffed  up  in  the  pride  of  their  own  conceit,  who  will  sacrifice  a 
conviction  to  an  epigram,  and  an  ideal  to  a  bon  mot.  They  are  the 
men  who  are  intolerant,  who  are  cruel,  who  are  hard,  who  are 
indifferent,  who  have  no  interest  in  democracy,  who  think  nothing 
of  their  brothers  in  mill  and  factory  and  office  and  mine  and  who 
care  little  how  other  men  live  so  long  as  they  be  comfortable,  who 
are  centered  on  their  own  prospects  and  their  own  ease.  The  dille- 
tante  in  art,  the  dogmatist  in  learning,  the  smug  conformist  in  con- 
duct, and  the  bigot  in  religion — these  are  all  deadly  sinners,  far 
removed  from  loving,  patient,  generous,  unselfish  and  believing  lives ; 
these  men  are  the  deformities  of  our  humanity.  So  dreadful  is 
their  situation  that  I  am  not  sure  that  you  who  belong  in  their  class 
can  understand  or  see  yourselves  as  I  describe  it,  but  if  you  can 
understand  and  see,  do  not  you  too  want  to  be  saved  ? 

I  speak  then  to  all  these  types  of  sinners  in  whose  number  I  most 
humbly  and  penitently  include  myself.     What  is  salvation  for  us? 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  25 

It  is  the  acceptance  for  the  free  forgiveness  of  God,  proclaimed  and 
certified  to  us  in  the  Hfe  and  death  of  Jesus,  our  Lord.  It  is  the  glad 
message  which,  since  Jesus  lived  and  died,  the  world  will  never  be 
able  to  forget,  that  even  such  men  as  you  and  I  can  be  rid  of  all  this 
sin,  can  be  forgiven  for  it,  can  come  back  into  power  and  freedom 
and  self-respect  and  ])cace,  and  that  all  we  have  got  to  do  to  get 
this  salvation  is  to  believe  in  this  God  of  Jesus,  accept  his  redeeming 
grace  and  love,  ask  for  it,  will  to  take  it,  live  in  it.  Lads  who  sin 
and  suffer,  there  is  a  way  to  restore  to  your  souls  the  self -respect 
which  you  have  ignorantly  lost.  Creatures  of  passion,  there  is  a 
way  to  redeem  the  soul,  ravaged  and  consumed,  by  extreme  and 
unbridled  desires.  Presumptuous  wrong-doers,  there  is  a  way  to 
shame  and  refine  and  elevate  the  life  that  is  brutalized  and  hard 
through  deliberate  wrong-doing.  Brothers  who  sin  against  the  spirit 
and  the  soul  of  humanity,  who  make  practical  negation  of  your 
brotherhood,  its  opportunities  and  responsibilities,  there  is  a  way  to 
soften  and  make  human  and  decent  again  your  lives.  That  way  is 
not  found  in  bitter  self-condemnation,  nor  in  reliance  upon  an  un- 
aided and  weakened  human  will ;  nor  in  the  hope  that  the  gradual 
education  of  life  and  the  gradual  lessening  of  the  fires  of  youth 
will  eventually  of  themselves  lead  us  into  some  sort  of  worn-out  and 
withered  continence.  No,  the  being  saved  from  the  sins  of  youth 
and  the  sins  of  age;  the  being  set  free  from  the  sins  that  are  blun- 
ders and  the  sins  that  are  insults ;  the  coming  back  of  the  soul  that 
has  been  led  far  off  from  peace  and  become  estranged  from  prayer, 
to  its  own  true  self ;  is  found  when  we  become  again  like  little  chil- 
dren ;  when  we  bring  our  confessions  to  the  redeeming  Christ ;  when 
we  are  men  enough  to  abase  ourselves  at  Christ's  feet  and  pray  for 
his  love  and  grace  to  help  us  to  ask  God  for  his  sake  to  forgive  us 
our  folly,  our  passion  and  our  crime ;  when  we  lay  hold  by  faith 
on  the  Saviour  of  the  world  and  walk  and  live  with  Him. 

And  now  let  me  describe  what  this  salvation  is.  Here  is  the  thing 
that  happens  to  a  man  when,  by  believing  in  the  God  of  Jesus, 
through  the  grace  of  the  life  and  death  of  Jesus,  he  repents  and 
asks  for  forgiveness  and  receives  pardon  and  peace  as  the  result. 
First  it  brings  a  man  into  a  new  relationship  with  God,  his  fellow- 
men,  his  own  self.  The  dreadful  sense  of  loneliness  and  estrange- 
ment is  gone.  We  don't  fear  God  any  more,  nor  feel  as  though  we 
were  living  in  a  sullen  and  perverted  world,  but  we  come  back  home 
to  Him.     That  which  the  theologians  call  guilt,  which  is  this  awful 


26  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

sense  of  being  at  odds  with  the  universe,  of  being  in  a  desperate 
and  helpless  situation,  is  removed.  Once  more  the  life  of  God  is 
permitted  to  flow  in  upon  our  lives,  and  we  are  able — O  wonderful 
and  blessed  fact — to  relinquish  our  lives  to  His,  and  the  constraint, 
the  fear,  the  restlessness  are  over.  And  it  gives  us  a  new  relationship 
with  our  fellow  men.  It  is  no  longer  our  fears,  our  shames,  our 
pride,  which  stand  between  us  and  other  men.  We  have  no  longer 
that  dreadful  self-consciousness  which  the  sinner  feels,  that  covert 
fear  that  people  are  estimating  us  and  finding  us  out.  Few  things 
are  more  paralyzing  to  initiative,  more  inhibitory  to  self-expression 
that  this  guilty  relationship  with  men.  But  all  this  disappears  in 
this  new  relationship,  we  become  natural,  free,  unafraid  in  all  our 
human  dealings.  The  world  is  once  more  a  friendly  universe,  and  it 
gives  us  a  new  relationship  with  our  own  selves.  That  consuming 
restlessness  which  grows  and  feeds  upon  itself  and  then  does  grow 
some  more,  subsides.  The  inner  distractions  are  removed.  There  is 
once  more  a  sense  of  unity,  and  hence  of  composure  and  authority  in 
the  personal  Hfe,  and  with  the  quelling  of  the  moral  anarchy,  the 
return  to  the  unity  of  self,  comes  also  to  the  return  of  respect  for 
self.  This  whole  fact  of  a  new  relationship  with  God  and  man  and 
Ourselves  is  what  theologians  call  reconciliation.  This  is  what  St. 
Paul  referred  to  when  he  said  that  God  was  in  Christ,  reconciling  the 
world  unto  himself. 

Again  salvation  means  a  new  character.  This  return  to  a  normal 
relationship  with  the  universe  brings  with  it  a  return  to  normal 
desires  and  a  new  and  overwhelming  distaste  for  vicious  habits  and 
indulgences.  The  great  tide  of  repentance  and  love  and  gratitude, 
which  rises  in  the  sinner's  heart,  washes  clear  the  moral  life.  It 
effaces  the  old  channels  in  the  brain  and  gives  a  powerful  impetus 
to  the  new  and  better  ones  that  are  about  to  form.  Of  course  this 
doesn't  mean  that  the  consequences  of  our  wrong  doing  are  taken 
away,  or  that  never  again  are  we  to  be  tempted  to  go  back  to  the 
old,  vicious  practices.  We  shall  be  tempted.  We  shall  have  to  fight 
and  fall  many  many  times  and  keep  struggling  onward  toward  the 
light,  but  we  know  something  now  we  never  knew  before.  We 
know  now  that  we  can  win  out  because  we  are  not  merely  fighting 
in  our  own  strength — and  every  man  who  fights  unaided  is  aware 
in  the  far  background  of  his  mind  that  such  a  fight  is  doomed  to 
failure  because  the  forces  against  him  are  too  many — but  now  we 
have  God  with  us  since  we  have  turned  ourselves  to  him,  and  the 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  27 

eventual  result  is  to  be  victory.  In  sliort  not  only  the  guilt  of  sin 
is  taken  away  by  this  blessed  fact  of  salvation,  but  the  power  of  it 
is  broken ;  the  captive  is  free !  Still  he  must  be  a  struggling  and  a 
fighting  man,  but  he  fights  with  God  as  a  freeman  in  a  free  universe. 
Who  can  measure  the  accession  of  hope  and  joy  and  courage  that 
this  brings  into  human  life?  I  suppose  the  old,  and  to  many  of  us 
the  very  precious  phrases  of  the  New  Testament,  about  the  washing 
away  of  a  man's  sin  refer  to  this  very  fact  of  experience ;  that  men 
who  through  Jesus  have  returned  themselves  to  God,  in  the  new  and 
pure  outburst  of  the  life  which  accompanies  that  return,  feel  as  if 
a  flashing  mountain  torrent  had  swept  down  through  the  valley  of 
their  humiliation,  had  carried  everything  unclean  and  foul  before  it, 
and  had  left  it  purified  and  fair  for  another  and  a  better  life. 

And,  finally,  salvation  brings  to  man  a  new  destiny,  for  this  entire 
regeneration  of  the  personality  is  a  moral  and  spiritual  process,  it  is 
inward  and  essential,  not  material  and  external.  And  this  new  ex- 
perience is  the  touchstone,  so  to  speak,  which  reveals  to  us  the  moral 
and  spiritual  realities  of  the  universe,  and  the  fact  that  we  are  akin 
to  them.  So  it  immeasurably  broadens  the  horizons  of  life,  reveals 
the  eternal  scope  and  significance  of  the  struggle  of  the  soul,  makes 
us  to  know  that  we  are  not  children  of  the  dust  but  of  the  stars,  not 
the  sons  of  night  but  of  the  eternal  morning.  So  by  this  process 
of  salvation,  men  come  to  know  themselves  as  sons  of  God,  and 
hence  as  brothers  of  the  race.  Their  lives  are  free  and  pure,  their 
minds  are  strong  and  calm,  their  hearts  are  fixed  upon  the  eternal, 
there  is  nothing  in  the  world  that  can  harm  them  or  make  them 
afraid.  In  His  light  we  see  light,  and  by  the  strength  of  the  eternal 
we  come  back  to  power  and  to  peace. 

So  it  is  my  high  privilege  to  give,  as  for  sixty-three  generations  of 
the  human  race  the  ministers  of  the  holy  catholic  church  of  Jesus 
Christ  have  been  giving,  the  great  invitation.  Any  man  in  this  room 
who  is  ashamed,  who  is  impure  of  mind,  or  sick  of  heart,  who  is 
helpless  or  bewildered,  or  callous  and  selfish  and  hard ;  any  and  all  of 
us  who  are  struggling  with  the  sorrow  and  loneliness,  the  sins  and 
fears  and  temptations  of  our  amazing  and  pathetic  humanity,  let 
us  bring  ourselves  tonight  to  that  Divine  Redeemer,  through  whom 
are  assuaged  the  sorrows  and  forgiven  the  sins  of  our  miserable, 
splendid  world. 


IV 


RELIGION  IN  ACTION;    WHAT  WOULD  THAT  MEAN 
FOR  ME  TODAY? 

We  have  come  to  the  last  of  our  four  talks  together  and  I  suppose 
that  I  shall  never  again  speak  to  all  this  company  of  men  after  to- 
night. And  the  theme  which  now  concerns  us  is  the  most  concrete,  the 
most  easily  intelligible  of  all — the  relation  of  our  religion  to  our 
daily  life,  how  these  great  faiths,  this  wonderful  moral  and  spiritual 
experience  expresses  and  verifies  itself,  is  borne  witness  to,  in 
conduct.  How  much  easier  it  is  to  speak  upon  a  theme,  so  intimate 
and  personal  as  this,  than  it  would  have  been  four  nights  ago.  You 
will  remember  that  I  told  you,  that  first  evening,  that  religion  is 
the  most  inclusive  and  potent  interest  of  our  race.  You  and  I  have 
been  proving  that  statement  together  ever  since.  For,  because  of 
the  majesty  and  vitality  of  the  theme  we  have  been  discussing  we 
all  understand  one  another  tonight.  Nothing  but  religion  could 
have  so  truly  and  so  quickly  made  us  one  in  a  common  faith  and 
confidence  and  love.  I  talk  tonight  not  merely  to  Princeton  under- 
graduates but  to  my  brothers.  I  stand  tonight  among  my  friends; 
I  love  them,  they  love  me. 

Now  the  first  thing  that  I  want  to  do  is  to  make  clear  the  supreme 
importance  of  tonight's  discussion.  We  are  not  going  to  close  this 
series  of  meetings  with  any  attempt  to  register  by  statistics  their 
efifect.  We  shall  ask  you  to  sign  no  cards,  or  make,  in  this  or  any 
other  meeting,  any  specific  promises ;  nothing  which  would  remotely 
suggest  the  endeavor  to  corrall  any  of  you  into  a  mechanical  or 
external  allegiance  is  to  be  attempted.  Most  of  all  no  one  of  you, 
under  the  stress  of  the  emotion  which  a  great  public  meeting  like 
this  might  naturally  arouse,  is  to  be  asked  for  an  immediate  un- 
reflective  decision.  We  have  tried  to  set  religion  before  you  not  as 
a  discipline,  but  as  the  greatest  opportunity  that  life  offers.  We 
have  tried  to  make  you  see  its  high  and  inherent  reasonableness,  its 
natural  and  fundamental  relationship  to  the  whole  man  and  to  the 
whole  of  our  race  ;  we  have  tried  to  show  the  needs  which  it  meets  and 
the  gifts  which  it  oflfers.      And  now  it  seems  to  us  that  having 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  29 

honestly  and  faithfully  given  you  the  message  we  should  leave  you 
to  the  spirit  of  God  and  let  Him  do  his  own  work  among  you ;  and 
should  direct  you  for  further  human  counsel  and  inspiration  to  those 
ministers  and  instructors  here  in  your  own  community  whose  daily 
lives  you  know,  and  whose  unfeigned  unselfish  and  steadfast  interest 
in  you  is  assured. 

But,  just  for  this  very  reason,  because  there  is  to  be  no  attempt 
to  register  spiritual  effects  by  mechanical  means,  it  is  the  more 
important  to  point  out  to  you  that  you  yourselves  must  see  to  it,  by 
such  means  as  your  own  situation  and  your  own  conscience  shall 
point  out,  that  the  effect  of  this  week's  work  shall  not  be  permitted 
to  dissipate  itself  in  passing  emotions.  It  must  not  be  true  of  you 
that  you  are  to  be  neither  better  nor  worse  than  you  were  before 
the  meetings  began.  If  that  should  happen  then  it  were  a  thousand 
times  better  the  meetings  had  never  been  held.  You  who  know  even 
the  elements  of  psychology  understand  that  for  a  man  to  submit 
himself  to  any  influence  which  enables  him  to  think  more  clearly  or  to 
feel  more  deeply  and  then  for  that  man  not  to  translate  his  new 
vision  and  his  new  resolve  into  life  and  action  is  most  degenerative. 
Emotion  which  leads  to  nothing  turns  a  man  into  a  sentimentalist. 
If  what  you  dare  to  dream  of  you  dare  not  to  do,  then  you  are 
despicable  both  in  your  own  eyes  and  in  those  of  your  fellowmen, 
and  your  dreams  are  your  dangers.  We  owe  it  to  ourselves,  to  the 
University,. and  to  religion  that 

The  task  in  hours  of  insight  willed 
Shall  be  in  days  of  gloom  fulfilled. 

It  is  then  of  the  content  of  that  task  that  we  turn  now  to  speak, 
and  I  want  to  present  it  under  four  main  heads. 

First:  the  way  in  which  the  Princeton  undergraduate  will  begin 
to  live  out  his  religious  life  will  be  by  attending  more  scrupulously 
and  more  effectively  to  his  academic  duties.  No  man  can  get  his 
life  right  with  God  unless  he  puts  first  things  first  in  it.  One  of 
the  subtle  temptations  which  every  beginning  Christian  faces  is  not 
so  much  to  do  things  that  are  wrong  as  it  is  to  put  otY  the  funda- 
mental and  more  difficult  duties  and  occupy  ourselves  with  secondary, 
easier  and  more  attractive  ones.  Now  a  man  who  is  truly  religious 
is  honest,  and  he  faces  himself  and  his  situation  as  they  actually 
are.  What  does  this  place  stand  for  ?  It  stands  for  intellectual  disci- 
pline.    Schools  are  for  schooling;  places  of  learning  for  learning. 


30  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

Some  things  at  some  times  in  a  man's  life  are  first,  other  things  at 
other  times.  The  first  thing  now  for  you  is  to  get  your  lessons.  Do 
you  want  to  know  what  I  want  to  see  of  a  young  disciple  in  Princeton 
University  and  what  I  reverently  believe  Christ  wants  to  see  of  him? 
I  want  to  see  a  young  Christian  scholar,  a  man  of  intellectual  con- 
science, sober  in  statement,  accurate  in  thinking,  scrupulous  in  per- 
forming academic  duties,  a  man  who  is  disciplining  his  mind  for 
Christ's  sake.  This  is  the  way  in  which  Christian  discipleship  first 
shows  itself  in  a  college.  Discipleship  cannot  be  summed  up  here 
merely  in  clean  and  amiable  living,  nor  in  a  devout  and  pietistic  life ) 
it  does  not  begin  with  social  service,  nor  with  any  of  the  other  things 
that  you  might  think.  Christianity  in  a  college  begins  with  intellectual 
industry  and  a  high  regard  for  your  primary,  which  is  to  say  your 
academic  duties.  We  all  remember  the  story  related  in  the  biography 
of  Phillips  Brooks  of  what  happened  when  he  first  went  down 
to  Alexandria  in  Virginia  to  begin  his  theological  training.  He 
arrived  in  the  evening,  after  the  courses  of  the  day  were  over,  and 
found  his  fellow  students  engaged  in  a  prayer  meeting.  He  was 
naturally  a  shy  man,  with  no  great  facility  of  superficial  religious 
expression,  and  he  was  both  embarrassed  and  discouraged  as  he  saw 
the  ease  and  eloquence  with  which  the  students  prayed  and  testified, 
some  of  them  witnessing  as  though  their  very  souls  were  on  fire. 
Brooks  felt  himself  humble  and  abashed  in  the  presence  of  these 
young  apostles.  But  in  the  following  days  when  he  saw  these  men  in 
the  class  room,  heard  them  fail  in  their  various  courses,  realized 
the  intellectual  laziness  and  failure  in  academic  duties  which  they 
displayed,  he  then  felt  for  them  a  healthy  and  well  merited  contempt. 
No  man  can  do  much  for  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  in  this  college  who 
is  not  able  to  convince  his  peers  here  that  he  works  hard  on  his  les- 
sons for  Jesus*  sake.  Indeed  one  of  the  most  serious  questions  facing 
us  now  in  American  colleges  is  the  extraordinary  feeling  that  has 
f^rown  up  among  undergraduates  that  not  only  is  learning  incidental 
and  that  social  activities,  athletics,  literary  and  dramatic  endeavors 
are  more  important,  l)Ut  that  religion  has  no  intimate  and  necessary 
connection  with  the  intellectual  life.  Over  against  this  fundamental 
heresy,  we  must  place  again  and  again  the  assertion  that  religion 
is  most  naturally  and  justly  presented  to  men  in  your  situation 
through  their  minds  by  the  appeal  not  to  their  emotions  but  to  their 
intelligence,  and  that  the  first  place  in  which  a  new  religious  life 
will  show  itself  will  be  in  a  higher,  a  more  serious  and  patient 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  31 

scholarship.  If  you  bcHcve  that  the  Infinilc  Father  looks  down  upon 
all  his  children  old  and  young,  and,  in  his  omniscience  is  able  to  ob- 
serve and  estimate  us  all,  then  you  may  be  sure  that  what  he  wants 
to  see  of  you  tonight  as  you  go  out  from  this  meeting  to  re-begin 
the  routine  life  of  the  college,  is  a  more  willing,  a  more  adequate 
and  loyal  allegiance  to  your  distinctively  academic  duties. 

Second:  Parallel  with  this  expression  of  religion  in  college  life 
must  be  the  living  of  it  out  in  character.  No  religion  is  real  unless 
it  issues  in  the  progressive  achievement  of  moral  victory.  No  man 
can  keep  his  self-respect,  his  sense  of  personal  sincerity,  unless  he 
links  up  his  religious  emotion,  all  the  dynamic  of  a  great  faith  and 
a  great  vision  with  every  day  conduct.  It  is  by  our  fruits  that  men 
shall  know  us,  and  the  most  indispensable  of  those  fruits  is  a  sober, 
righteous  and  Godly  life.  We  must  never  forget  that  no  man  may 
be  allowed  to  divorce  religion  from  conduct.  We  must  remember 
that  ''what  a  man  is  speaks  so  loud  men  cannot  hear  what  he  says." 
It  is  in  the  homely,  every  day,  often  distasteful  duties  that  one 
exercises  one's  religion  until  it  grows  and  deepens  in  power  and 
reality.  You  must  demand  of  yourselves,  as  certainly  the  world  will 
demand  of  you,  that  a  revival  of  religion  in  this  University  will  show 
itself  in  the  wiping  out  of  profanity,  in  the  resolute  setting  of  under- 
graduate opinion  against  vulgar  and  dirty  speech.  It  is  a  well 
known  fact  that  the  grosser  forms  of  immorality  are  decidedly 
lessening  in  American  colleges,  but  callous  and  brutal  and  irreverent 
and  licentious  language  is  amazingly  common.  Now  no  man  can  call 
himself  a  follower  of  Jesus  who  does  not  keep  his  mind  and  his 
mouth  clean.  We  dare  not  say  we  are  religious  if  we  permit  ourselves 
to  take  the  name  of  God  in  vain.  All  that  ancient  and  vile  vocabu- 
lary, which  comes  down  to  us,  not  through  lexicons  and  dictionaries, 
but  is  handed  down  from  generation  to  generation  by  word  of  mouth 
in  all  sorts  of  crooked  and  furtive  ways  in  the  purlieus  of  our  towns 
and  cities  among  crooked  and  dirty  people — all  that  we  have  got  to 
get  rid  of.  The  men  who  last  night  in  this  college  sat  up  all  night 
long  at  their  game  of  poker,  the  men  who  condone  or  practice 
drunkenness,  the  men  whose  indiflference  on  grave,  moral  questions 
helps  to  make  undergraduate  public  opinion  low  and  inefYective.  all 
these  men  have  got  to  turn  about  in  their  tracks  if  the  religion 
which  they  have  seen  here  today  is  to  remain  with  us  and  to  be  a  liv- 
ing reality  not  a  name.  The  mere  pietist  who  can  talk  about  religion 
and  feel  religion,  but  does  not  incarnate  it  in  a  brave,  unselfish,  pure 


32  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

minded,  honorable  and  dutiful  life  has  neither  respect  of  God  nor 
men  nor  even  of  his  own  soul.  Salvation  is  not  indeed  by  character, 
but  salvation  is  to  character.  The  most  certain  way  to  increase  your 
religion,  to  know  its  truth  and  power,  is  to  use  it  all  in  the  daily 
struggle  for  those  moral  attainments,  that  high  and  unselfish  self- 
control  in  which  it  naturally  issues.  Whatever  else  shall  be  said  to 
you  tonight  which  you  may  or  may  not  remember,  I  pray  that  you 
may  never  forget  this — God's  man  is  a  good  man. 

Third :  No  man  can  put  religion  into  action  today  unless  he  clearly 
realizes  that  it  does  not  stop  with  personal  character  and  cannot  be 
identified  with  it,  but  that  characer  is  the  means  toward  the  expres- 
sion of  religion  in  the  unselfish  and  sacrificial  service  of  our  fellow 
human  beings.  The  Christian  must  understand  his  world,  must 
realize  the  social  and  economic  injustice  which  curses  it,  must  have 
a  profound  care  for  it,  feel  a  solemn  responsibility  for  the  economic 
unrest  and  misery  of  our  time,  and  address  himself  to  its  allevia- 
tion. One  of  the  most  depressing  things  about  the  American  college 
is  the  provincialism  of  the  average  student.  Personalities,  events  and 
facts  which  belong  to  your  immediate  locality  chiefly  interest  you. 
Your  lives  are  so  sheltered,  they  have  so  much  of  the  gracious,  the 
lovely  and  the  pleasant,  enjoy  such  freedom  and  such  leisure  that 
you  almost  lose  the  power  to  realize  how  needlessly  hard  and  cruelly 
unjust  is  the  lot  of  most  men  and  women  who  live  just  beyond  these 
sheltering  academic  walls.  But  it  is  for  these  human  beings,  your 
brothers,  who  are  born  in  poverty  and  ignorance,  live  in  misery  and 
injustice,  go  out  at  the  end,  drink  sodden  and  despairing,  passing  from 
blackness  here  into  blackness  there — it  is  for  them  you  have  your 
religion,  and  with  courage  and  insight  and  sacrifice  you  must  address 
yourself  to  their  release  from  bondage.  If  Jesus  taught  anything 
at  all  he  taught  this — that  no  man  is  the  son  of  God  unless  he  is  a 
brother  of  the  race ;  that  oneness  with  God  is  accomplished  through 
union  with  humanity ;  that  Christianity  is  not  a  doctrine,  it  is  a  life, 
a  serving,  sharing,  sacrificing  life.  If  I  love  not  my  brother  whom 
1  have  seen  how  can  I  love  God  whom  I  have  not  seen.  Therefore 
in  every  social  struggle,  the  obligation  is  solemn  and  heavy  upon  the 
Christian  student  to  be  profoundly  interested.  In  the  old  days  of 
another  civilization,  of  a  social  order  based  upon  other  principles, 
Christianity  chiefly  expressed  itself  in  individualistic  terms.  The 
disciple  was  like  Christian  in  Bunyan's  Pilgrim's  IVogress.  The 
moment  Christian  realized  the  City  of  Destruction  was  doomed, 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  33 

he  fled  away  from  it;  he  forgot  wife  and  cliild  and  friend  and 
neighbor  and  kinsfolk.  Sohtary  and  self-absorbed  he  made  his 
way  through  the  Slough  of  Despond  and  the  straight  and  narrow 
gate,  past  the  Interpreter's  House  and  the  House  Beautiful  to  the 
Delectable  Mountains.  But  today  the  Christian  knows  full  well,  if 
he  really  believes  in  and  follows  Jesus,  that  it  is  not  his  personal 
salvation  that  he  seeks  but  the  bringing  of  the  Kingdom  of  God 
on  earth  through  that  personal  salvation.  Our  world  is  full  of  Cities 
of  Destruction  !  You  and  I  can  neither  ignore  them  nor  despise  them 
nor  desert  them.  It  is  our  blessed  duty  to  endeavor  to  redeem  them. 
We  must  live  for  them  or  die  with  them. 

Therefore,  as  we  regards  our  fellow  men,  we  desire  and  we  mean  to 
know  their  fears  and  hopes  and  ambitions,  their  passions  and  de- 
spair. We  see  the  present  life  about  us,  not  as  a  great  and  moving 
pageant,  sometimes  glittering  and  splendid,  sometimes  sombre  and 
terrific,  but  to  be  ever  viewed  with  the  cool  and  indifferent  scrutiny 
of  the  spectator  or  to  be  coolly  and  shrewdly  used  for  the  futherance 
of  our  own  ambitions — no,  we  see  it  as  the  consecrated,  blood- 
stained arena,  upon  whose  torn  and  darkened  sands,  strewn  with  the 
wreck  and  debris  of  the  ages,  are  fought  out  the  piteous  life  and 
death  struggles  of  separate  human  beings.  And  for  them  our 
hearts  beat,  for  them  our  minds  work,  for  them  our  will  is  strong. 
Into  their  fierce  and  tragic  conflict  we  long  to  plunge  our  lives. 
The  Christian  student,  by  virtue  of  his  university  training  and  his 
spiritual  equipment,  declares  to  himself, — ''surely  the  only  true 
knowledge  of  my  fellow  men  is  that  which  enables  me  to  feel  with 
them.  My  subtlest  analysis  will  have  no  justification  and  it  will 
miss  the  essential  truths  unless  it  be  lit  up  by  that  love  which  sees  in 
all  forms  of  human  thought  and  work  the  veritable  and  precious 
struggles  of  beloved  human  beings."  The  laborer  who  joins  the 
Union  and  the  scab  who  keeps  out  of  it ;  the  man  who  drinks  because 
he  is  poor  and  the  man  who  is  poor  because  he  drinks ;  the  man 
who  tramps  because  he  can't  get  work,  and  the  man  who  can't  get 
work  because  he  tramps;  the  much  married  or  the  non-married 
men  and  women  who  have  never  had  a  chance  to  see  what  true  love 
is  and  never  had  a  chance  to  make  a  home  in  which  to  cultivate  it, — 
these  are  the  very  people  for  whom  the  disciples  of  the  Nazarene  are 
put  into  this  world !  Any  notion  of  ourselves  as  the  fastidious  elect, 
and  of  these  as  the  impossibles  and  the  degenerates,  any  indif- 
ference, ignorance,  blindness  as  to  the  way  in  which  the  other  three- 


34  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

quarters  live,  is  in  us,  criminal.  The  Father-God,  and  the  suffering 
world  have  a  right  to  expect  that  the  liberally-educated  Christian 
will  feel  the  horror,  the  godlessness,  the  awfulness,  of  faring 
sumptuously  every  day  without  real  and  vital  concern  for  the 
thousands  of  Lazaruses  who  lie  in  their  sores,  amid  the  dirt  and 
the  dogs,  outside  our  gates.  I  am  dwelling  purposely  on  this  for 
in  every  age  of  the  world  Christian  discipleship  has  justified  itself 
as  it  has  expressed  itself  in  the  terms  of  the  greatest  need  and 
addressed  itself  to  the  most  poignant  problems  of  its  particular  time 
and  place.  That  the  need  and  the  problem  of  our  day  is  social  and 
industrial  no  sane  man  can  doubt.  We  must  not  suppose  for  a 
moment  that  our  father's  expression  of  religion  would  be  an  ade- 
quate expression  of  it  for  us.  He  tried  with  it  to  meet  his  day 
and  generation ;  we  must  try  with  it  to  meet  ours.  Hence  both  the 
University  and  the  Church  have  the  right  to  expect  of  you  that  you 
will  make  your  coming  profession  or  business  not  merely  a  means 
to  a  living,  but  a  means  to  the  serving  of  the  needy,  to  a  correcting 
of  the  injustices  in  your  time  and  generation.  Religion  in  action 
today  for  the  generous  and  the  cultivated  man  means  the  confes- 
sion that  any  man  or  any  race  or  creed  or  color  who  does  not 
have  a  full  and  abundant  life  in  any  department  of  his  being 
becomes  thereby  the  immediate  object,  not  merely  of  our  interest  but 
of  our  patient  and  unselfish  service.  H  there  is  anything  desirable 
that  I  possess  and  value,  according  to  the  teaching  of  Jesus  I  cannot 
rest  until  my  brother  shall  have  a  chance  to  share  its  possession  and 
enjoy  its  excellence.  My  raison  d'etre  as  a  Christian  is  to  serve  my 
race.  The  lynched  negro  of  the  South,  and  the  men  who  lynch  him 
too,  the  wretched  wanderer  on  my  city  streets,  the  child  of  the  neg- 
lected rich,  the  children  in  the  cotton  mills  and  the  glass  factories, 
the  women  in  the  sweat  shops,  the  operatives  in  the  dust-laden, 
fluff-filled  air  of  the  factories,  and  we  ourselves — all  are  one.  We 
acknowledge  no  distinction,  no  difference  in  relationship,  no  grada- 
tion in  responsibility.  When  the  day  shall  come  that  those  who 
confess  and  call  themselves  Christians  shall  compete  for  service,  not 
for  mastery ;  shall  strive  side  by  side  to  see  who  shall  best  measure 
his  life  by  loss  instead  of  gain,  not  by  the  wine  drunk  but  by  the  wine 
poured  forth ;  then  we  shall  know  for  the  first  time  in  this  wretched, 
struggling,  stumbling  world,  the  joy  and  freedom,  the  peace  and 
sweetness  of  a  real  brotherhood. 

Fourth:     Religion  in  action  will  finally  and  supremely  express 
itself  in  the  increasing  power  to  relinquish  our  lives,  wholly  and 


RELIGION  AND  THE  UNDERGRADUATE  35 

consciously,  into  the  keeping  of  the  eternal.  By  the  obedient  will 
and  the  open  mind  and  the  loving  heart ;  by  the  daily  reading  of 
the  words  of  life;  by  the  precious  and  difficult  exercise  of  prayer; 
by  much  meditation  upon  the  life  and  person,  the  teaching  and 
sacrifice  of  Jesus,  men  have  come  to  more  and  more  live  within 
the  spirit  of  the  universe,  and  to  find  the  passion  for  his  glory  taking 
up  into  itself  all  lesser  desires,  there  to  cleanse  and  empower  them. 
When  a  man  searches  for  the  truth  and  loves  it  with  a  true  and 
holy  passion  because  the  truth  is  not  something  impersonal,  just  to 
be  sought  for  its  own  inherent  worth,  but  because  the  truth  is  the 
expression  of  the  mind  of  God,  having  absolute  and  illimitable  sig- 
nificance, then  he  becomes  a  religious  scholar  and  his  faith  has 
added  something  to  the  insight,  the  depth,  the  quality  and  extent  of 
his  scholarship  that  nothing  else  could  give.  When  a  man  gives 
himself  over  to  the  beauty  of  the  world,  greatly  desiring  that  beauty 
and  trying  to  reproduce  it  in  his  own  life  because  he  believes  and 
knows  that  beauty  is  excellent,  has  its  final  worth  and  meaning,  be- 
cause it  is  the  expression  of  the  infinite  grace,  the  unutterable  love- 
liness of  deity,  then  religion,  having  sanctified  beauty,  has  given  it 
both  a  power  and  an  elevation  nothing  else  could  oflFer.  When 
a  man  loves  goodness  and  delights  in  whatever  is  pure  and  brave 
and  patient  and  unselfish,  because  all  this  moral  life  he  knows  and 
and  feels  to  be  derived  from  infinite  holiness,  then  the  moral  life 
has  a  sanction  and  a  splendor  which  only  religion  can  oflfer.  When 
a  man  loves  his  fellow  men,  because  in  every  one  of  them  beneath 
the  sin  and  the  sorrow,  the  ignorance,  wretchedness,  injustice  he 
knows  is  concealed  of  the  glory  of  the  face  of  the  Son  of  God, — 
then  his  love  for  men,  since  it  springs  out  of  his  vision  of  the  eternal 
Fatherhood,  is  a  sufficient  and  a  perfect  brotherhood.  As  men 
are  thus  able  to  trace  all  the  fundamental  passions  and  relations 
of  their  lives  back  to  the  one  source  from  which  they  issue ;  as  we 
thus  interpret  and  live  all  life  in  terms  of  the  eternal,  thus  do  we 
come  fully  into  the  power  and  freedom  of  religion.  It  is  only 
the  man  who  tries  to  walk  with  God  who  is  fundamentally  reli- 
gious, and  what  he  is  in  God  makes  potent  and  beneficent  every 
activity  and  relationship  of  his  life.  I  have  asked  you  tonight  to  dis- 
cipline and  use  your  minds  for  Jesus*  sake ;  to  strive  persistently, 
through  the  power  and  grace  of  Jesus,  to  gain  the  light  and  peace 
of  moral  victory;  to  open  your  arms  to  the  men  whom  Jesus  has 
taught  us  are  our  brothers,  to  walk  shoulder  to  shoulder  with  them, 
sharing  all  you  are  and  have  on  the  hard  and  painful  road  of  life. 


36  ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

The  final  word  is  this.  All  these  things  must  be  done  for  God's 
glory;  all  these  things  can  only  be  fully  done  when  we  have  the 
consciousness  and  the  power  of  God's  presence ;  when  they  are  thus 
done  and  all  in  human  life  is  seen  projected  on  the  screen  of  an 
infinite  existence  and  progressing  toward  infinite  and  eternal  ends, 
then  the  glory  and  the  majesty  of  religion  are  ours. 

So  religion  in  action  sums  itself  up  in  the  end  in  the  cultivation 
of  the  inner  life,  the  personal,  spiritual  exercises  which  must  be 
the  source  and  dynamic  for  all  the  far  flung  activity.  And  the  final 
word  I  have  to  say  is  of  mystical  and  personal  religion.  Make  for 
yourself  within  your  own  life  an  inner  sanctuary,  into  which  no 
other  human  eye  may  ever  look,  up  to  whose  door  no  other  human 
step  shall  ever  come.  Cleanse  and  sanctify  the  outer  life  that  this 
inner  refuge  may  be  real  and  shining,  and  then  every  day,  and 
more  than  once  in  every  day,  withdraw  yourself  from  the  world  and 
all  its  life  that  presently  you  may  enter  more  deeply  and  effectively 
into  it.  Draw  in  the  widespread  abundant  forces  of  your  nature, 
fix  the  mind,  the  heart,  the  will  upon  the  thought,  the  presence,  the 
person  and  the  power  of  God.  Get  yourself  by  yourself  until  you 
are  alone  and  for  a  time  for  you,  the  universe  holds  nothing  but 
the  Eternal  and  your  presence  before  Him.  Go  up  to  the  door 
of  your  own  soul,  to  this  inner  shining  sanctuary,  enter  and  shut 
out  the  world.  There  be  still  and  know  that  He  is  God ;  there  eat 
the  meat  which  the  world  knoweth  not  of;  there  have  peace  with 
Him.  If  you  will  do  this,  you  will  know  that  religion  is  the  only 
thing  in  life  which  never  disappoints,  which  always  satisfies,  which 
abides  unaltered  amid  the  changes  of  time  and  the  delusions  of 
men.  In  that  sanctuary  God  will  keep  you  secretly  as  in  a  pavilion 
from  the  strife  of  tongues.  He  will  correct  the  perspective,  He 
will  renew  the  vision,  He  will  recharge  the  vital  forces.  From  that 
inner  refuge,  out  of  these  hours  of  communion,  these  experiences  of 
the  eternal,  you  will  issue  into  all  the  noise  and  tumult  of  the 
daily  life  about  you,  able  to  understand  it,  to  interpret  and  guide 
and  emancipate  it ;  able  to  love  and  to  believe  in  your  fellow  men, 
able  to  bear  with  them  in  infinite  patience,  to  estimate  them  with 
divine  charity,  to  show  to  them  the  way  of  life.  There  is  not  a 
man  in  this  University  who,  if  he  will  only  resolve  to  believe  in  and 
follow  Jesus,  to  trust  the  God  of  Jesus  for  forgiveness  and  grace 
and  strength,  to  live  by  His  life  and  increasingly  to  appropriate  it 
day  by  day,  may  not  go  forth  from  the  University  into  the  unknown 
perils  and  contacts  of  his  future  conquering  and  to  conquer. 


